Business infrastructure software often includes one or more separate components. For example, Progress Software Corporation of Bedford, Mass. provides a business visibility system, known as Actional. Business visibility software provides, among other functions, the ability to dynamically discover services deployed throughout the topology of an enterprise business services infrastructure. Business visibility software may, for example, provide access to events from legacy accounting or other systems. Progress Software Corporation also provides a business event processing system, known as Apama, which allows complex business events to be analyzed and patterns to be detected. Progress Software Corporation further provides a business process management system, known as Savvion, which allows for business process visibility, analysis, modeling and execution.
Although existing business infrastructure support software components have some relationships to each other, they often arise from distinct legacy systems, are not integrated into a unified system, and lack effective mechanisms for interacting and communicating. Attempts to permit these components to communicate with each other involve the use of complex and custom “glue” code that is difficult to revise or apply to new business processes or platforms.
Business process management systems provide numerous capabilities for the monitoring of business processes which are modeled and executed within the business process management system. Such capabilities include for example analysis tools for the measurement and display of metrics with respect to the status of the processes, times to execute worksteps in the processes, and bottlenecks in the processes. These capabilities are not available from the business process management system for business processes which execute in systems external to the business process management system.